The Branscombe Road Pact

Beatrix Cramer walked to her sister's house through the winter dark of Claremont with the premonitory cold still lodged at the base of her skull, and by the time she reached the front step, Gladys had already opened the door. The grip that closed around Beatrix's arm was not a greeting. It was the desperate anchor of a woman who had spent hours alone with knowledge that threatened to unseat her from the ordered life she had constructed around herself like scaffolding, and who needed another body in the house before the structure gave way entirely. The door slammed behind them with a finality that neither sister registered as symbolic but both would remember later as the sound of a threshold crossed.

What Gladys placed before Beatrix was not an explanation but an object — a plastic water bottle, crumpled from hours of compulsive handling, its label marked with handwriting that did not belong to any branding department. Jamie Greyson had written on it. Jamie Greyson, who had vanished into a place Gladys could barely name without her voice fracturing, had sent a message back through the Portal by means of something so mundane it might have been discarded without a second glance by anyone less desperate than the woman who had received it. The message was brief. Its implications were not. It named Brody Taylor's death as something other than what the official record had concluded, and it named Beatrix as someone who already knew this.

The accusation embedded in that revelation — that Beatrix had carried knowledge of Brody's murder without sharing it with the sister who had discovered his body — detonated between them with a force the wine could soften but not absorb. Gladys had spent the hours before the phone call cycling between fury and terror, the betrayal of her sister's silence competing for precedence with the impossible reality of inter-dimensional portals and a friend trapped beyond retrieval. She had promised Luke Smith she would keep her mouth shut about everything she had witnessed. She had broken that promise within hours, because the message on the bottle had made silence unbearable, and because Beatrix was the only person alive who might understand why.

Beatrix read the message and felt the architecture of her careful concealment begin to buckle. She had known about Clivilius longer than Gladys suspected. Leigh Trogaris had given her fragments across the months of their entanglement — guarded, rationed, offered with the reluctance of a man who understood that certain knowledge, once transferred, could not be recalled. He had spoken of the Portal with the reverence and wariness of someone who had carried its burden long enough to understand that it was not a gift but a responsibility whose weight deformed every life it touched. Beatrix had accepted the boundaries Leigh imposed. She had not pressed beyond the threshold he maintained between what she was permitted to know and what he judged too dangerous to share. But she had absorbed enough to recognise, in her sister's panicked recounting of Luke's demonstrations and Jamie's disappearance, the shape of a reality she had been orbiting for years without ever being granted full entry.

The sisters occupied opposite ends of Gladys's white leather couch while the evening deepened around them and the wine worked its slow negotiation between what caution held shut and what urgency demanded be opened. Gladys spoke in uneven surges — the Portal's impossible colours, Luke's calm that had unsettled her more than the phenomenon itself, the physical sensation of proximity to something that violated every principle she had built her professional and personal life upon. Beatrix listened with an attention Gladys interpreted as astonishment but which was, in truth, the rapid recalibration of a woman fitting her sister's testimony into a framework she had possessed in partial form for longer than she was prepared to admit. Each sister held pieces the other lacked. Neither was yet willing to surrender the full inventory of what she knew.

The argument about disclosure surfaced as the evening's third bottle opened. Beatrix advanced the idea that Clivilius represented something humanity deserved to know about — an escape, a frontier, a door whose existence altered the moral calculus of secrecy. Gladys rejected this with the visceral certainty of someone whose entire career had been organised around the principle that uncontrolled disclosure constituted systemic risk. The disagreement escalated until Gladys deployed the leverage she had accumulated across decades of quiet observation — Beatrix's vulnerabilities, her dependence on the parental home at Lesdelle Street, the catalogue of incidents and indiscretions that the elder sister had documented not from malice but from the habitual vigilance of a woman who believed that information, properly filed, constituted protection against the chaos her younger sister perpetually generated. The threat was surgical. Beatrix recognised its precision and conceded, not because she agreed but because the evening's arithmetic did not favour resistance.

They reached the kitchen sink past midnight, standing shoulder to shoulder in the fluorescent light with the bottle between them and a box of matches on the benchtop. Beatrix peeled the label free in a single deliberate strip. Gladys struck the match. The sulphur flared and threw their faces into momentary relief — two women who had spent their lives in complementary opposition now performing the same act with the synchronised intention of co-conspirators who understood that what they were destroying was not merely evidence but the possibility of ever pretending, to each other, that this evening had not occurred. The flame found the label and consumed it. The ink blistered into illegibility. The plastic curled inward and surrendered to ash in the stainless-steel basin. The smell lingered — acrid, chemical — and neither woman moved to dispel it. It was the scent of a covenant.

What the burning sealed was not trust. It was something more durable and considerably less comfortable — the mutual recognition that each sister now possessed sufficient knowledge to devastate the other, and that silence, maintained by both, constituted the only structure capable of containing what the evening had exposed. Gladys understood this as risk management. Beatrix understood it as the logic of objects whose value depended entirely on the conditions of their storage. Both understandings pointed to the same conclusion: the pact held because breaking it would cost the breaker as much as the broken.

The hours after the burning dissolved into the formless territory that wine and emotional exhaustion produce when combined in sufficient quantity — half-recalled childhood anecdotes, the cats discussed with unearned gravity, their father's lectures repurposed as comedy. It was the sound two people make when they have said everything consequential and cannot yet tolerate the silence that should follow. Gladys recovered her composure first, as she always did, and installed Beatrix in the spare room. Beatrix navigated the hallway with the impaired coordination of a woman whose body had surrendered well in advance of her mind, and the door closed behind her with a soft click that separated the sisters into their respective darknesses.